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Well, a friend of mine let me play a couple hours on the Call of Yog-Sothoth Dragonborn DLC and...whoa...is the landscape a far cry from Skyrim's vistas. At the very beginning it's kind of depressing with the ashen hills and overcast skies, but once you move inland and higher up you'lll get reacquainted with Skyrim's familiar snow-covered slopes and rocky outgrowths. But despite the returning familiarity, Solstheim remains a really weeeird place - you really feel like you're away from home, from Skyrim.

Now, about the new creatures... The netches...well, Skyrim is my first Elder Scrolls game (I did think about buying Oblivion a couple years back but relented after reasserting my financial priorities) so this species kinda weirded me out (floating jellyfishes, really?)... A couple miles further away, adding even more befuddlement to my mind, seeing those giant, carved-out mushrooms, for some absolutely ridiculous reason, reminded me of the Smurfs, but in a surrealistic way. XD

The Rieklings...ah, I keep laughing every time I come across them, though I'm not exactly smiling whenever they burst out of the ground OR wooden barrels in order to ambush me. I hate surprise appearances like that (the only creatures in Skyrim that really succeeded in startling me so far were the bursting Gargoyles and the newly-born flying chaurus).

And come on, Bethesda...you should know by now that I hate insects and spiders, so why in the nine hells did you add more creepy-crawly horrors to your list of otherworldly predators? T_T (yeah, I'm referring to the ash hoppers as well as the albino and jumping spiders).

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Oh, and any of you guys feel like singing the Cthulhu song whenever a Seeker attacks you? I, for one, certainly do. ;p

Anyone having Dragonborn will have to grab the latest copy of FNIS, which should fix some animation problems occurring with the Unofficial DB Patch (http://skyrim.nexusmods.com/mods/31083/). It's helpful to read the comments, too.

Official High-Res Texture Pack received an update. It now has a 3rd ESP/BSA to load that includes HD textures for all 3 DLCs plus some fixes to a few glitchy vanilla HD textures. Some, if not all, fan-made fixes may have been rendered obsolete, so be careful.

Official High-Res Texture Pack received an update. It now has a 3rd ESP/BSA to load that includes HD textures for all 3 DLCs plus some fixes to a few glitchy vanilla HD textures. Some, if not all, fan-made fixes may have been rendered obsolete, so be careful.

That explains the 1.5GB update that came through for me today.
Ah, I probably need to get back into this game...

__________________

"Make sure you do a good job with your life's blueprint." - Kanna Makino

BTW, before I played Dragonborn, the .ESM needs to be cleaned first by running it through TES5edit, to weed out UDRs and ITMs.

Sidenote: Make sure your TES5Edit is version 3.0.28 (or later) before attempting this. Also, make sure you restore the original ESMs for Update, Dawnguard and Hearthfire and then re-clean them. The cleaning process has been revised and as such they need to be reverted and re-cleaned.

After some long hours, I happily dealt with DB's main quest villain Miraak, along with a few sidejobs that afforded me warm rooms, free food, drink and supplies.

(Thankfully, the DLC was working okay after cleaning it and with the unofficial patch on. Good thing I never installed mods that messed up the animations, dragons, skills and perks, and hadn't brought along a companion which would've caused some problems. Frostfall worked as well, but we can't use horses on the island... and if using Frostfall, be prepared to make some wet and cold swims that needed immediate drying afterwards.)

Oh, man, as if anything else wasn't tough enough, some of the quests literally took the cake for challenges that maxed me out. As for the levels, the Apocrypha world was a throwback to those days when I was playing out the last few levels of Half-Life -- weird as hell... No, Apocrypha is hell populated with an infinite bookshelf, powerful minions, and Hermaeus Mora, the gameworld's answer to Cthulhu.

Actually, Hermaeus Mora is slightly more reminiscent of Yog-Sothoth, while the Seekers (the creatures seen hovering around Miraak when the Dragonborn first accesses Apocrypha) are almost a copy-paste of Cthulhu, save for the absence of the bat-wings and legs.

On another note, I must agree that some of the quests in Dragonborn were more...challenging than those in Skyrim or Dawnguard. The quickly disappearing spell bridge in Vahlok's Tomb, the boiler cubes in that Dwarven ruin with Neloth, etc, generally required a little more wit, reflexes and better stats than the vanilla puzzles in Skyrim.

For some reason now, it seems I can't fast-travel to Neloth's house without a dragon spawning in my direct vicinity and spoiling for a fight. Jesus, that reminds me of the Winterhold College, where I had the exact same problem. T_T

For some reason now, it seems I can't fast-travel to Neloth's house without a dragon spawning in my direct vicinity and spoiling for a fight. Jesus, that reminds me of the Winterhold College, where I had the exact same problem. T_T

You got me recalling one run-through where I literally couldn't see through the courtyard at the mage college for all the dragon bones strewn about. Every time I'd fast travel there *poof* dragon. I think I had six or seven dragon corpses there.